The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Read Free Book Online Page B

twelve rounds of salami, each about the size of a coin, and helped himself to a handful of olives, like small change. Each evening, the Bakery department cleared its shelves of perfectly good bread, and this completed Pepper’s supper.
    After spending one terrifying night sleeping in an alley, he resolved never to do it again. So when six o’clock came, and everyone else laid dust covers over their counters and went home, Pepper did not leavethe store. Instead, he migrated to the Soft Furnishings department and slept there, in a splendid double bed, under a sheepskin rug.
    A penny candle lent him enough light to read the day’s newspapers, which he gathered from the waste cans in the top-floor offices. Word by word, column by column, Pepper scanned news of wars and murders, scandals and road accidents. He read the business pages (though they made no sense); the sports results (though his mother had never let him play rough sports); reviews of exhibitions and concerts (though he had never been to either a concert or an art gallery). He studied the advertisements and the cartoons, the births and the marriages.
    But he saved the obituaries till last.
    Then he would look for the names of his friends aboard L’Ombrage , before finally looking for his own name—(Roux, not Salami)—hoping and dreading he would find it. If the death of Captain Roux was announced, would his mother read it and think she was a widow? Or would his father read it, leap to his feet, and shout, “It’s a damned lie!” Aunt Mireille was probably even now scanning the Births, Deaths, &Marriages section, still hoping for proof that le pauvre had kept his appointment with the saints.
    And do the saints read the newspaper too, Pepper wondered? Do the angels sit around, like taxi drivers between fares, browsing through news of wars and epidemics, checking the obituaries for some poor soul they have accidentally missed? Could they be fooled? Was it worth a try? Pepper toyed with the idea of posting a notice of his death in the newspapers.
    He ought to place an announcement about Roche, at least, he thought, taking the unmailed letter from his jacket pocket:
    Dear Madame Roche,
    I am very sorry in deed to tell you…I did not no him very well, but I expect you did. I am sure he is happy with the saints.
    Pepper corrected his spelling mistakes. Reading the newspaper had brought one great benefit: His spelling was getting better.
    Lying back on the big bed at night, Pepper was confronted by a maze of brass tubes crisscrossing theceiling. There were no cash registers in the Marseillais Department Store. Whenever a customer paid, the money was placed in a brass canister, the canister inserted into a tube, and the canister, at the tug of a handle, shot by compressed air along this maze of overhead tubing. It traveled far, far away, to a tiny cage where a cashier took out the money, replaced it with a receipt and any change, and sent it whizzing back through the labyrinth of pipes.
    For reasons of hygiene, there was no cash tube in the delicatessen—customers paid at nearby Dry Goods. So after the store shut, Pepper made up for lost time, running from department to department, firing canisters from everywhere to everywhere else, like an artillery barrage. It was the best fun in the world! He imagined how it would feel to be the size of a mouse and climb inside one of those canisters and be rocketed along at heart-stopping speed—around bends and corners, over the heads of customers and shop assistants, unseen, undetected but for a rattle and a musical sigh like a swanny whistle.
    Downstairs, the night watchman heard the noise and pushed back his chair, reaching for his keys andhis nightstick—then hesitated. What intruder, what burglar, would be using the overhead conveyor system? Why would he? There was only one explanation: ghosts. One-time shop assistants, long-dead cashiers must be the cause of those eerie whizzes and thumps. And a nightstick is useless